The world's favourite diplomat: A Man of Peace in a World of War.

Kofi Annan 

By Stanley Meisler

[pounds sterling]19.99 Wiley

ISBN 0-471-78744-2

Including the incumbent, Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, there have only been eight UN secretary-generals in the 62-year history of the organisation, set up in the immediate post-WWII period as an attempt to diffuse international conflicts and promote global peace and stability. Ki-moon's seven predecessors, all men, were Trygve Lie of Norway, Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden, U Thant of Burma, Kurt Waldheim of Austria, Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, and Kofi Annan of Ghana whose term of office ended at the beginning of this year.

Describing his book as a political biography of Annan, Stanley Meisler helps to explain why he is generally considered one of the UN's most accomplished and dedicated secretary-generals. It also helps to explain why Annan was asked to chair the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership committee (see Briefs p9-10).

Meisler is the author of United Nations--The First Fifty Years, and has got to know Annan well over the many years he has covered both the UN and US State Department for the Los Angeles Times. As such a renowned UN journalist and author, he is particularly well placed to write this absorbing study of one of Africa's most distinguished diplomats, although he makes it clear that this is not an authorised biography,

Nevertheless, in his introduction to the book, Meisler states that Annan did co-operate with the project, encouraging his staff and friends to meet with the author. But Annan did not have prior sight of the book before its publication and had no say regarding its contents. "I have tried to present a frank and illuminating picture of a complex man based on what we know of his acts and words," Meisler explains. "There is very little psychological speculation in the book ... is also very little political science theorising. Annan is not an ideologue or an academic theorist."

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There may be little psychological speculation, but Meisler devotes enough of this book to Annan's youth to give the reader an insight of the man's formative years.

Annan's father, Henry Reginald Annan, was a Fante chief and an executive of the United Africa Company, a subsidiary of Unilever, with the primary responsibility of purchasing cocoa. After retirement, he served as chairman of the Ghana International Bank and other government agencies and won election as governor of the Ashanti Province.

Annan senior was in the habit of holding mock trials on those occasions that his children misbehaved, and it seems that the elders of the family liked to bombard the children with traditional proverbs. One of Annan's favourites is: "You don't hit a man on the head when you've got your fingers in his mouth." This kind of upbringing helped Annan develop his seemingly effortless diplomatic skills in later life.

Non-stellar performance

Yet Annan's scholastic performance, we learn from Meisler, was not stellar. Sent away to board at Mfantisipim near Cape Coast, Annan was a popular student but did not excel academically nor score well enough to enter the University College of the Gold Coast. Instead, he went on to study at the new Kumasi Institute of Science and Technology. Meisler tracked down the then headmaster of Mfantisipim, now in his 90s and living in retirement in Paris, who described Annan as a 'late developer'.

Late it may have been, but develop he did--by 1959 Annan had won a scholarship from the Ford Foundation's Foreign Student Leadership Programme to study at Macalester University at St Paul, Minnesota in the US. Annan impressed the Dean of Macalester enough for him to comment that, in his estimation, Annan was destined for a lifetime of accomplishment--that he would be a world leader someday. But it would take some three decades for Annan to prove him right and reach the upper echelons of the UN.

From Macalester, Annan went on to study economics in Switzerland before, in 1962, accepting a job with the UN's World Health Organisation in Geneva as an administrative and budget officer. He then took up a new appointment as an administrative officer in the personnel section of UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The ECA shared its headquarters at Africa Hall in Addis Ababa with the old Organisation for African Unity, and Annan recalls that he attended many of the OAUs meetings and was "... quite frankly sometimes appalled by the posturing and lack of realism that went on". His stint with the ECA was to last for seven years, interspersed with a one-year sabbatical at MIT as an Alfred Sloan Fellow and one year's UN training in New York.

In 1972 he was posted back to Geneva, before getting his first taste of UN peacekeeping--assigned to temporary duty with the UN Emergency Force in Egypt following the 1973 Yom Kippur war. But 12 months later he was to try an abrupt change of career when he became the managing director of the Ghana Tourist Agency in Accra. According to Meisler it was an almost impossible job, and Annan returned to the UN within two years.

After a couple of years in the UN's personnel office in New York, Annan landed a plum assignment in 1980--head of personnel at the UNHCR. This kick-started his rise up the UN ladder. By 1983, Annan had moved back to the UN's New York secretariat as director of administrative management services before being spotted by then SG Javier Perez de Cueller who promoted him to assistant secretary-general.

A stern test

The first Gulf War in 1990 was to provide Annan with his first major diplomatic test. Iraq's president Saddam Hussein had taken 900 UN personnel and their dependents hostage and Annan was tasked with accompanying Virendra Dayal, the SG's chief of staff, to travel to Baghdad and negotiate their release.

Although the UN and Western hostages were soon released, Annan became concerned for the half million Asian and African workers who had neither the money nor organisation to leave the country. In what was to later become a hallmark of his diplomatic style as SG, he quietly and efficiently made the rounds of the workers' embassies and helped organise the airlifts to get them home.

By the time that Boutros Boutros-Ghali took over as SG, the UN's peacekeeping operations had grown to 13 operations involving 55,000 blue-helmeted troops. A new post of deputy undersecretary-general for special political affairs (as the office of peacekeeping was then known) needed to be created to assist its head, Marrack Goulding, and Annan got the job.

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This new job involved Annan taking responsibility for the Middle East and much of Africa, including Somalia where he counselled a much more interventionist policy than Goulding. When the SG backed Annan, Goulding moved out of peacekeeping and, in mid-1993, Annan was made undersecretary-general.

Meisler describes Annan's time as head of the department as an era of spectacular increases in peacekeeping operations in the UN's history, and one of spectacular falls. Annan launched six new missions within eight months but he had to get governments to provide troops and equipment for these missions, and he was not always successful in this task despite his well-known charm and persuasiveness.

He did not have, nor seek, a particularly high public profile. Nevertheless, when the Somali mission fell apart following the 'Black Hawk Down' debacle in Mogadishu, and the US administration placed the blame on Boutros-Ghali and the UN before lobbying for the SG's removal, Annan was singled out as the favoured replacement.

Meisler suggests that Annan learned from this episode the limitations of US willingness to participate in peacekeeping missions. Somalia also unleashed a mood of UN-bashing in the US that would linger and intensify under the Bush administration, throughout Annan's UN career and to this day.

Haunting accusations

Whilst this book covers Annan's role in all the major international events of the late 20th and early 21st century--such as Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and of course the Iraq invasion--it is in the analysis of Annan's performance as undersecretary-general in the 1994 Rwanda genocide where there is a concerted attempt to set the record straight regarding Annan's reputation.

The accusations that have haunted Annan over the Rwanda genocide stem from him allegedly ignoring a cable from the UN military commander in the country, Brigadier-General Romeo Dallaire. That cable warned him of the impending slaughter.

While Meisler accepts that Annan was deeply affected by the Rwandan experience, he argues that Annan's response to Dallaire's cable was driven by an overriding concern that the UN Security Council would be unlikely to authorise a military intervention. So Annan decided to try to deal with the threat in a diplomatic manner, instructing Dallaire and the UN's senior official in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, to seek an urgent meeting with President Habyarimana and tell him that they knew of the plans of Hutu extremists.

Annan explains: "Often, shining a light on and telling those planning it at a government level that the international community knows what is being planned--'we are monitoring, we are going to deal with you harshly, and we know what you are up to'--sometimes is a very good deterrent." Yet Annan's hopes that Habyarimana would or could restrain the militant Hutus were dashed when the president's plane was shot down approaching Kigali airport, signalling the start of the genocide.

Dallaire himself has never criticised Annan over his response to the cable, and in Meisler's assessment, Annan acted "in a characteristic way. He was serious, conservative, cautious, sensitive to US politics, faithful to UN resolutions, and deeply averse to any dramatic gesture".

The author also tellingly adds that the UN, in the final analysis, is dependent on the members of the Security Council--and that means that the UN's failings over Rwanda, rather than being the responsibility of the UN undersecretary-general, should be seen as a failure of the Security Council members as a whole.